John Ciardi
Encyclopedia
John Anthony Ciardi (June 24, 1916 - March 30, 1986) was an American
poet
, translator
, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet, he also translated Dante
's Divine Comedy, wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, and directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
in Vermont
. In 1959, Ciardi published a book on how to read, write, and teach poetry, How Does a Poem Mean?, which has proven to be among the most-used books of its kind. At the peak of his popularity in the early 1960s, Ciardi also had a network television program on CBS, Accent. Ciardi's impact on poetry is perhaps best measured through the younger poets whom he influenced as a teacher and as editor of The Saturday Review.
's Little Italy
. After the death of his father in 1919, he was raised by his Italian mother (who was illiterate) and his three older sisters, all of whom scrimped and saved until they had enough money to send him to college.In 1921, two years after his father was killed in an automobile accident, the family moved to Medford, Massachusetts
, where the young Ciardi peddled vegetables to the neighbors and attended public schools." "Ciardi began his higher studies at Bates College
in Lewiston, Maine
, but transferred to Tufts University
in Boston, where he studied under the poet John Holmes." "He received his degree in 1938, and won a scholarship to the University of Michigan
, where he obtained his master's degree the next year and won the first of many awards for his poetry," e.g., the prestigious Hopwood Award
in poetry.
Ciardi taught briefly at the University of Kansas City before joining the United States Army Air Forces
in 1942, becoming a gunner on B-29
s and flying some twenty missions over Japan before being transferred to desk duty in 1945. He was discharged in October 1945 with the rank of Technical Sergeant and with both the Air Medal
and Oak Leaf Cluster
. Ciardi's war diary, Saipan, was published posthumously in 1988. After the war, Ciardi returned to UKC for the spring semester 1946, where he met and married Myra Judith Hostetter on July 28 (who at the time was a journalist and journalism instructor). Immediately after the wedding, the couple left for a third-floor apartment at Ciardi's Medford, Massachusetts home, which his mother and sisters had put together for the man of their family and his new bride.
John Ciardi was a longtime resident of Metuchen, New Jersey
. He died on Easter Sunday
in 1986 of a heart attack
, but not before composing his own epitaph
:
, where he stayed until 1953." "While at Harvard, Mr. Ciardi began his long association with the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College
in Vermont
, where he lectured on poetry for almost 30 years, half that time as director of the program."
Ciardi had published his first book of poems, Homeward to America, in 1940, before the war, and his next book, Other Skies, focusing on his wartime experiences, was published in 1947. His third book, Live Another Day, came out in 1949. In 1950, Ciardi edited a poetry collection, Mid-Century American Poets, which identified the best poets of the generation that had come into its own in the 1940s: Richard Wilbur
, Muriel Rukeyser
, John Frederick Nims
, Karl Shapiro
, Elizabeth Bishop
, Theodore Roethke
, Delmore Schwartz
, Randall Jarrell
, Robert Lowell
, Ciardi himself, and several others. Each poet selected several poems for inclusion, plus his or her comments on the poetic principles that guided the compositions, addressing especially the issue of the so-called "unintelligibility" of modern poetry.
Ciardi had begun translating Dante for his classes at Harvard and continued with the work throughout his time there. His translation of The Inferno was published in 1954. Dudley Fitts
, himself an important mid-century translator, said of Ciardi's version, "[H]ere is our Dante, Dante for the first time translated into virile, tense American verse; a work of enormous erudition which (like its original) never forgets to be poetry; a shining event in a bad age." Joan Acocella
(née Ross), however, noted “The constant stretching for a heartier, more modern and American idiom not only vulgarizes; it also guarantees that wherever Dante expresses himself by implication rather than by direct statement, Ciardi will either miss or ignore the nuance.” The translation "is widely used at universities." Ciardi's translation of The Purgatorio followed in 1961 and The Paradiso in 1970. Ciardi's version of Inferno was recorded and released by Folkways Records
in 1954. Two years later, Ciardi would have his work featured again on an album entitled, As If: Poems, New and Selected, by John Ciardi.
In 1953, Ciardi joined the English Department at Rutgers University
in order to begin a writing program, but after eight successful years there, he resigned his professorship in 1961 in favor of several other more lucrative careers, especially fall and spring tours on the college lecture circuit, and to "devote himself fulltime to literary pursuits." (When he left Rutgers, he famously quipped that teaching was "planned poverty.") He was popular enough and interesting enough to warrant a pair of appearances in the early 1960s with Johnny Carson
on The Tonight Show
. "Poetry editor of Saturday Review from 1956 to 1972, he wrote the 1959 poetry textbook How Does A Poem Mean." Ciardi was a "fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member and former president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters." From 1980 until his death, "he produced a weekly three-minute spot on etymology, or the study of the origin of words, for National Public Radio entitled Word In Your Ear." He also taught at the University of Florida
.
For the last decade of his life, he reported on word histories on National Public Radio's Morning Edition
, as an outgrowth of his series of books of etymologies, A Browser's Dictionary (1980), A Second Browser's Dictionary (1983) and Good Words to You (posthumously published in 1987). Among 20th-century American men of letters, he maintained a notably high profile and level of popularity with the general public, as well as a reputation for considerable craftsmanship in his output. Burton Raffel
summed up Ciardi's career as follows: “Blessed with a fine voice, a ready wit, and a relentless honesty, Ciardi became in many ways an archetype of the existentially successful twentieth-century American poet, peripatetic, able to fit into and exploit chinks in the great American scheme of things, while never fitting in as either a recognized peg or hole.”
described Ciardi as ". . . singularly unlike most American poets with their narrow lives and feuds. He is more like a very literate, gently appetitive, Italo-American airplane pilot, fond of deep simple things like his wife and kids, his friends and students, Dante's verse and good food and wine." "During his years at Bread Loaf and at the Saturday Review, Ciardi established a reputation as a tough, sometimes harsh, critic." "His review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 1956 book The Unicorn touched off what the Review's editor, Norman Cousins
, described as the biggest storm of reader protest in the magazine's history." "Ciardi defended his stand, noting that it was the reviewer's duty to damn when warranted." May Sarton
, for example, accused Ciardi of "hat[ing her] guts and [of doing] everything he could to destroy [her]" in describing the difficulties faced by women poets.
Ciardi did not fare well during the counterculture of the late 1960s
and 1970s. He had been a fresh, sometimes brash, voice for modern poetry, but as he approached his fiftieth birthday in 1966, he had become entrenched and his voice became bitter, sometimes bumptious. He urged his only remaining students, those at Bread Loaf for two weeks each August, to learn how to write within the tradition before abandoning it in favor of undisciplined, improvisational free verse. Ciardi was unceremoniously fired from Bread Loaf in 1972, after serving seventeen years as director, and not having missed a single year on the poetry staff since 1947.
Over the past quarter century, John Ciardi has come to be regarded as a mid-level, mid-century formalist, one who was replaced in literary history by the more daring and colorful Beat
, Confessional, and Black Mountain poets
. However, with revisionism chipping away at the reputations of the latter groups, and the emergence of Dana Gioia
and the New Formalists
in the late twentieth century, Ciardi's type of mostly understated verse, what he praised as the Unimportant Poem, reads much better than it has in many years. His best poems in collections like his verse autobiography, Lives of X (1971) or the opening sequence of bird poems in Person to Person (1964), or several of his love poems in I Marry You (1958) or the many Italian American poems that are sprinkled throughout his Collected Poems (1997)--all have a quietly assertive voice that pleases.
In recognition of Ciardi's work, a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry given annually to an Italian American poet for lifetime achievement in poetry.
and commentary on words such as daisy, demijohn, jimmies
, gerrymander, glitch
, snafu
, cretin, and baseball
, among others, are available from the archives of NPR's website.
NPR also began making his commentaries available as podcast
s, starting in November 2005.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, translator
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
, and etymologist. While primarily known as a poet, he also translated Dante
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
's Divine Comedy, wrote several volumes of children's poetry, pursued etymology, contributed to the Saturday Review as a columnist and long-time poetry editor, and directed the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is a writers' conference held every summer at the Bread Loaf Inn, near Bread Loaf Mountain, east of Middlebury, Vermont...
in Vermont
Vermont
Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd in land area, , and 45th in total area. Its population according to the 2010 census, 630,337, is the second smallest in the country, larger only than Wyoming. It is the only New England...
. In 1959, Ciardi published a book on how to read, write, and teach poetry, How Does a Poem Mean?, which has proven to be among the most-used books of its kind. At the peak of his popularity in the early 1960s, Ciardi also had a network television program on CBS, Accent. Ciardi's impact on poetry is perhaps best measured through the younger poets whom he influenced as a teacher and as editor of The Saturday Review.
Biography
Ciardi was born at home in BostonBoston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
's Little Italy
North End, Boston, Massachusetts
The North End is a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It has the distinction of being the city's oldest residential community, where people have lived continuously since it was settled in the 1630s. Though small , the neighborhood has approximately 100 eating establishments, and a variety of...
. After the death of his father in 1919, he was raised by his Italian mother (who was illiterate) and his three older sisters, all of whom scrimped and saved until they had enough money to send him to college.In 1921, two years after his father was killed in an automobile accident, the family moved to Medford, Massachusetts
Medford, Massachusetts
Medford is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the United States, on the Mystic River, five miles northwest of downtown Boston. In the 2010 U.S. Census, Medford's population was 56,173...
, where the young Ciardi peddled vegetables to the neighbors and attended public schools." "Ciardi began his higher studies at Bates College
Bates College
Bates College is a highly selective, private liberal arts college located in Lewiston, Maine, in the United States. and was most recently ranked 21st in the nation in the 2011 US News Best Liberal Arts Colleges rankings. The college was founded in 1855 by abolitionists...
in Lewiston, Maine
Lewiston, Maine
Lewiston is a city in Androscoggin County in Maine, and the second-largest city in the state. The population was 41,592 at the 2010 census. It is one of two principal cities of and included within the Lewiston-Auburn, Maine metropolitan New England city and town area and the Lewiston-Auburn, Maine...
, but transferred to Tufts University
Tufts University
Tufts University is a private research university located in Medford/Somerville, near Boston, Massachusetts. It is organized into ten schools, including two undergraduate programs and eight graduate divisions, on four campuses in Massachusetts and on the eastern border of France...
in Boston, where he studied under the poet John Holmes." "He received his degree in 1938, and won a scholarship to the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, where he obtained his master's degree the next year and won the first of many awards for his poetry," e.g., the prestigious Hopwood Award
Hopwood Award
The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.Under the terms of the will of Avery Hopwood, a prominent American dramatist and member of the Class of 1905 of The University of Michigan, one-fifth of Mr. Hopwood's estate was given to the...
in poetry.
Ciardi taught briefly at the University of Kansas City before joining the United States Army Air Forces
United States Army Air Forces
The United States Army Air Forces was the military aviation arm of the United States of America during and immediately after World War II, and the direct predecessor of the United States Air Force....
in 1942, becoming a gunner on B-29
B-29 Superfortress
The B-29 Superfortress is a four-engine propeller-driven heavy bomber designed by Boeing that was flown primarily by the United States Air Forces in late-World War II and through the Korean War. The B-29 was one of the largest aircraft to see service during World War II...
s and flying some twenty missions over Japan before being transferred to desk duty in 1945. He was discharged in October 1945 with the rank of Technical Sergeant and with both the Air Medal
Air Medal
The Air Medal is a military decoration of the United States. The award was created in 1942, and is awarded for meritorious achievement while participating in aerial flight.-Criteria:...
and Oak Leaf Cluster
Oak leaf cluster
An oak leaf cluster is a common device which is placed on U.S. Army and Air Force awards and decorations to denote those who have received more than one bestowal of a particular decoration. The number of oak leaf clusters typically indicates the number of subsequent awards of the decoration...
. Ciardi's war diary, Saipan, was published posthumously in 1988. After the war, Ciardi returned to UKC for the spring semester 1946, where he met and married Myra Judith Hostetter on July 28 (who at the time was a journalist and journalism instructor). Immediately after the wedding, the couple left for a third-floor apartment at Ciardi's Medford, Massachusetts home, which his mother and sisters had put together for the man of their family and his new bride.
John Ciardi was a longtime resident of Metuchen, New Jersey
Metuchen, New Jersey
Metuchen is a Borough in Middlesex County, New Jersey, United States, which is 8 miles northeast of New Brunswick, 18 miles southwest of Newark, 24 miles southwest of Jersey City, and 29 miles southwest of Manhattan, all part of the New York metropolitan area...
. He died on Easter Sunday
Easter
Easter is the central feast in the Christian liturgical year. According to the Canonical gospels, Jesus rose from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion. His resurrection is celebrated on Easter Day or Easter Sunday...
in 1986 of a heart attack
Myocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
, but not before composing his own epitaph
Epitaph
An epitaph is a short text honoring a deceased person, strictly speaking that is inscribed on their tombstone or plaque, but also used figuratively. Some are specified by the dead person beforehand, others chosen by those responsible for the burial...
:
Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was. Such as it was
This one beside it is a slum.
Literary career
"After the war, Mr. Ciardi returned briefly to Kansas State, before being named instructor [in 1946], and later assistant professor, in the Briggs Copeland chair at Harvard UniversityHarvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, where he stayed until 1953." "While at Harvard, Mr. Ciardi began his long association with the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College
Middlebury College
Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college located in Middlebury, Vermont, USA. Founded in 1800, it is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the United States. Drawing 2,400 undergraduates from all 50 United States and over 70 countries, Middlebury offers 44 majors in the arts,...
in Vermont
Vermont
Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state ranks 43rd in land area, , and 45th in total area. Its population according to the 2010 census, 630,337, is the second smallest in the country, larger only than Wyoming. It is the only New England...
, where he lectured on poetry for almost 30 years, half that time as director of the program."
Ciardi had published his first book of poems, Homeward to America, in 1940, before the war, and his next book, Other Skies, focusing on his wartime experiences, was published in 1947. His third book, Live Another Day, came out in 1949. In 1950, Ciardi edited a poetry collection, Mid-Century American Poets, which identified the best poets of the generation that had come into its own in the 1940s: Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur
Richard Purdy Wilbur is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and again in 1989....
, Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism...
, John Frederick Nims
John Frederick Nims
John Frederick Nims was an American poet and academic.-Life:He graduated from DePaul University, University of Notre Dame with an M.A., and from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in 1945.He published reviews of the works by Robert Lowell and W. S. Merwin...
, Karl Shapiro
Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro was an American poet. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.-Biography:...
, Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956 and a National Book Award Winner for Poetry in 1970. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artists' retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia...
, Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke was an American poet, who published several volumes of poetry characterized by its rhythm, rhyming, and natural imagery. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking.-Biography:...
, Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer from Brooklyn, New York.-Biography:Schwartz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. Later, in 1930,...
, Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell
Randall Jarrell was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a role which now holds the title of US Poet Laureate.-Life:Jarrell was a native of Nashville, Tennessee...
, Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
, Ciardi himself, and several others. Each poet selected several poems for inclusion, plus his or her comments on the poetic principles that guided the compositions, addressing especially the issue of the so-called "unintelligibility" of modern poetry.
Ciardi had begun translating Dante for his classes at Harvard and continued with the work throughout his time there. His translation of The Inferno was published in 1954. Dudley Fitts
Dudley Fitts
Dudley Fitts was an American teacher, critic, poet, andtranslator. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and attended Harvard University where he edited the Harvard Advocate. He taught at The Choate School 1926-1941 and at Phillips Academy at Andover 1941-1968...
, himself an important mid-century translator, said of Ciardi's version, "[H]ere is our Dante, Dante for the first time translated into virile, tense American verse; a work of enormous erudition which (like its original) never forgets to be poetry; a shining event in a bad age." Joan Acocella
Joan Acocella
Joan B. Acocella is an American journalist who is the dance and book critic for The New Yorker. She has written several books on dance, literature, and psychology....
(née Ross), however, noted “The constant stretching for a heartier, more modern and American idiom not only vulgarizes; it also guarantees that wherever Dante expresses himself by implication rather than by direct statement, Ciardi will either miss or ignore the nuance.” The translation "is widely used at universities." Ciardi's translation of The Purgatorio followed in 1961 and The Paradiso in 1970. Ciardi's version of Inferno was recorded and released by Folkways Records
Folkways Records
Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.-History:...
in 1954. Two years later, Ciardi would have his work featured again on an album entitled, As If: Poems, New and Selected, by John Ciardi.
In 1953, Ciardi joined the English Department at Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
in order to begin a writing program, but after eight successful years there, he resigned his professorship in 1961 in favor of several other more lucrative careers, especially fall and spring tours on the college lecture circuit, and to "devote himself fulltime to literary pursuits." (When he left Rutgers, he famously quipped that teaching was "planned poverty.") He was popular enough and interesting enough to warrant a pair of appearances in the early 1960s with Johnny Carson
Johnny Carson
John William "Johnny" Carson was an American television host and comedian, known as host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for 30 years . Carson received six Emmy Awards including the Governor Award and a 1985 Peabody Award; he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1987...
on The Tonight Show
The Tonight Show
The Tonight Show is an American late-night talk show that has aired on NBC since 1954. It is the longest currently running regularly scheduled entertainment program in the United States, and the third longest-running show on NBC, after Meet the Press and Today.The Tonight Show has been hosted by...
. "Poetry editor of Saturday Review from 1956 to 1972, he wrote the 1959 poetry textbook How Does A Poem Mean." Ciardi was a "fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member and former president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters." From 1980 until his death, "he produced a weekly three-minute spot on etymology, or the study of the origin of words, for National Public Radio entitled Word In Your Ear." He also taught at the University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
.
For the last decade of his life, he reported on word histories on National Public Radio's Morning Edition
Morning Edition
Morning Edition is an American radio news program produced and distributed by National Public Radio . It airs weekday mornings and runs for two hours, and many stations repeat one or both hours. The show feeds live from 05:00 to 09:00 ET, with feeds and updates as required until noon...
, as an outgrowth of his series of books of etymologies, A Browser's Dictionary (1980), A Second Browser's Dictionary (1983) and Good Words to You (posthumously published in 1987). Among 20th-century American men of letters, he maintained a notably high profile and level of popularity with the general public, as well as a reputation for considerable craftsmanship in his output. Burton Raffel
Burton Raffel
Burton Raffel is a translator, a poet and a teacher. He has translated many poems, including the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, poems by Horace, and Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. In 1964, Raffel recorded an album along with Robert P...
summed up Ciardi's career as follows: “Blessed with a fine voice, a ready wit, and a relentless honesty, Ciardi became in many ways an archetype of the existentially successful twentieth-century American poet, peripatetic, able to fit into and exploit chinks in the great American scheme of things, while never fitting in as either a recognized peg or hole.”
Legacy
Critic and poet Kenneth RexrothKenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...
described Ciardi as ". . . singularly unlike most American poets with their narrow lives and feuds. He is more like a very literate, gently appetitive, Italo-American airplane pilot, fond of deep simple things like his wife and kids, his friends and students, Dante's verse and good food and wine." "During his years at Bread Loaf and at the Saturday Review, Ciardi established a reputation as a tough, sometimes harsh, critic." "His review of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 1956 book The Unicorn touched off what the Review's editor, Norman Cousins
Norman Cousins
Norman Cousins was an American political journalist, author, professor, and world peace advocate.-Early life and education:...
, described as the biggest storm of reader protest in the magazine's history." "Ciardi defended his stand, noting that it was the reviewer's duty to damn when warranted." May Sarton
May Sarton
May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton , an American poet, novelist, and memoirist.-Biography:...
, for example, accused Ciardi of "hat[ing her] guts and [of doing] everything he could to destroy [her]" in describing the difficulties faced by women poets.
Ciardi did not fare well during the counterculture of the late 1960s
Counterculture of the 1960s
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a cultural movement that mainly developed in the United States and spread throughout much of the western world between 1960 and 1973. The movement gained momentum during the U.S. government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam...
and 1970s. He had been a fresh, sometimes brash, voice for modern poetry, but as he approached his fiftieth birthday in 1966, he had become entrenched and his voice became bitter, sometimes bumptious. He urged his only remaining students, those at Bread Loaf for two weeks each August, to learn how to write within the tradition before abandoning it in favor of undisciplined, improvisational free verse. Ciardi was unceremoniously fired from Bread Loaf in 1972, after serving seventeen years as director, and not having missed a single year on the poetry staff since 1947.
Over the past quarter century, John Ciardi has come to be regarded as a mid-level, mid-century formalist, one who was replaced in literary history by the more daring and colorful Beat
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, Confessional, and Black Mountain poets
Black Mountain poets
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...
. However, with revisionism chipping away at the reputations of the latter groups, and the emergence of Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia
-Poetry:It was as a poet that Gioia first began to attract widespread attention in the early 1980s, with frequent appearances in The Hudson Review, Poetry, and The New Yorker. In the same period, he published a number of essays and book reviews...
and the New Formalists
New Formalism
New Formalism is a late-20th and early 21st century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical and rhymed verse.-Origins and intentions:...
in the late twentieth century, Ciardi's type of mostly understated verse, what he praised as the Unimportant Poem, reads much better than it has in many years. His best poems in collections like his verse autobiography, Lives of X (1971) or the opening sequence of bird poems in Person to Person (1964), or several of his love poems in I Marry You (1958) or the many Italian American poems that are sprinkled throughout his Collected Poems (1997)--all have a quietly assertive voice that pleases.
In recognition of Ciardi's work, a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry given annually to an Italian American poet for lifetime achievement in poetry.
On Words
National Public Radio (NPR) continues to make Ciardi's commentaries available. EtymologiesEtymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
and commentary on words such as daisy, demijohn, jimmies
Sprinkles
Sprinkles are very small pieces of confectionery used as a decoration or to add texture to desserts—typically cupcakes, cookies, doughnuts, ice cream, frozen yogurt, and some puddings...
, gerrymander, glitch
Glitch
A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot...
, snafu
Snafu
Snafu may refer to:* SNAFU, an acronym* Snafu , an English rhythm and blues band of the 1970s* Snafu, a 1970 album by East Of Eden* Snafu , a 1981 Intellivision video game title published by Mattel Electronics...
, cretin, and baseball
Baseball
Baseball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of nine players each. The aim is to score runs by hitting a thrown ball with a bat and touching a series of four bases arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot diamond...
, among others, are available from the archives of NPR's website.
NPR also began making his commentaries available as podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
s, starting in November 2005.
Awards
"In 1956, Ciardi received the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1982, the National Council of Teachers of English awarded him its award for excellence in children's poetry." He also won American Platform Association's Carl Sandburg Award in 1980.External links
- John Ciardi biography and example of his poetry. Part of a series of poets.
- Ciardi Discography on Folkways
- http://www.nndb.com/people/958/000115613/ Cicardi's Net Names Database Entry